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Coming Into the Country: Part 2

A Land Gone Lonesome by Dan O'Neill Who must have this book: Anyone who has read McPhee's Coming into the Country. Who should have this book: Anyone interested in living in the bush of Alaska. ISBN: 1582433445

Ever since it was published, all accounts of living in Alaska have been measured against John McPhee’s Coming into the Country. Now that book is 30 years old and badly in need of revisiting. This book does a great job of checking in on the tough subsistence trappers that were living on the upper Yukon River except for one thing – they are gone.

Dan O’Neill floats the Yukon River from Dawson City to McPhee’s Eagle, Alaska to celebrate the toughness of those who chose to make this forboding place as their home. In the end though, the celebration turns to mourning as he tells of a lifestyle that is all but gone, done in by modern life and government policy.

The book easily stands on its own without reading Coming into the Country, but they augment each other very well. O’Neill packs the pages full of stories and histories of this haunting area, making you wish you could grab a canoe and explore the area (which you can and should) or maybe even move out into the wilderness (which you can’t.)

This is a great book about people fighting nature and government and making a niche and realities of bureaucracy and economics. It makes for great bed-time reading. If you are one of the millions who read Coming Into the Country, get this one, you owe it to yourself to get the next chapter of the story.

Overview

This book is a running journal of Dan O’Neill’s solo float down the Yukon River in 2005. It is laid out as a series of stories and biographies of people and places as he passes them on the river. The one thing I wish this book had more of is illustrations (it has none.) However, O’Neill does a great job of painting the pictures with his words.

He covers everything from the earliest prospectors to the parasites that are now attacking the King Salmon of the River, and everything in between. A great read, and a great human history of the Yukon Charley National Preserve.

Author

Dan O’Neill is a long time Alaskan who has written several books about Alaska including A Land Gone Lonesome, The Last Giant of Berengia and the award-winning Firecracker Boys. He is a literate historian.